For Hunter, that Monday morning started with a trip back to Melissa Hawthorne’s house. He got there before the sun was up.
Albeit necessary, the forensics circus provided a craziness of movement, people, noise, and lights that was a whole world away from what the original crime scene would have been like. Hunter wanted to walk the scene alone, no distractions, with the lights out and with the house as quiet and as still as it would’ve been just before Melissa was killed.
He didn’t really believe in premonition, omen, clairvoyance, or whatever name people liked to call it. He also didn’t believe that by revisiting the crime scene on his own, he would somehow get abrupt visions of what had really happened in there. What he did believe in, what he knew existed was evil… the human kind… the kind that could lead someone to rip the life out of a young woman in one of the vilest ways Hunter had ever seen. And evil, sometimes, would leave clues behind.
That morning, Hunter spent almost two hours inside Melissa Hawthorne’s house. Most of that time was spent in the living room/kitchen area. The pool of blood had been cleaned from the floor, but a stain still remained, marking the exact location where a young woman had been robbed of her life. The room now also carried a particular smell that came with the aftermath of every crime scene. It wasn’t the putrid smell of decomposition. That was a very different smell all together, and Melissa Hawthorne’s body had been days away from entering that stage when found. No, this was a peculiar smell – part sweet, part heavy iron, and part disinfectant agents. The crime scene clean up team had, once again, done their job well.
Standing in the exact spot where Melissa’s body had been found, his feet at the center of where the pool of blood had once been, arms sunk to his sides, Hunter looked up at the ceiling, stretching his neck until he couldn’t anymore. He held his head in that position for a few seconds before moving his chin forward as much as he possibly could to also stretch his lower jaw. As he did, he felt a pull under his tongue, followed by his throat constricting.
Hunter held himself in that new position for several seconds, trying as best as he could to imagine Melissa Hawthorne’s agony… her desperation… her pain… her panic… her terror… because she knew that no one was coming for her. She knew she would die.
All of a sudden, the skin on both of his arms turned into gooseflesh and he felt as if something was trying to dig a hole into his stomach.
And there it was, as if Hunter could sense it – evil. Its ugly, invisible presence somehow still lingering in the air… still embedded in those walls, like some sort of ‘catch me if you can’ tease.
Hunter lasted less than a minute in that position before he had to let go.
He stepped back from the bloodstain on the floor and looked around the kitchen one last time.
The gooseflesh didn’t go away.
The pit in his stomach didn’t go away.
True, death and evil had stained that house for ever, but what had really left Hunter with a very bad taste in his mouth was that he knew from experience that that sort of evil, personal or not, very rarely came in a single dose. More often than not, the urge to hurt… to kill again… was too strong, practically impossible to contain. It was just a matter of time.